Motivation
As we enter the month of October, something important that determines the next four years occurs across all of Ontario; that is the municipal elections taking place on October 24th! Also, the provincial election that occurred in June resulted in the lowest voter turnout rate at just 45.53%. This news article published by Cornell University titled “Modelling suggests friendships may lead to lopsided elections” really spiked my interest as a somewhat political junkie, particularly around voter suppression.
Analysis
In the first few lectures, we looked at networks as a graph modelling human friendships or connectivity and how different structures can influence things such as relationships and behaviours. The article explores modelling employed by researchers to simulate friendship networks as opposed to looking at past election data. In particular, an Erdös-Renyi model was used to simulate the possible different friendship networks.
By looking at different friendship network structures it found that some featured the characteristic that people felt that their vote did not matter as it would not change the outcome which is a big issue in every election campaign. These structures often resulted in two forms of vote abstinence: complacency and dejectedness. Complacency is the effect where people (represented as nodes) are surrounded predominantly by other notes with matching opinions resulting in them not voting as they are convinced their preferred candidate will win regardless. Dejectedness is the opposite where people are surrounded predominately by nodes with opposite opinions resulting in them not voting because they believe their preferred candidate is hopeless and has no chance of winning. Complacency and dejectedness together can lead to elections that are “undemocratic”. It is viewed as undemocratic as the winner may only have a minority of the voter’s support but a majority of the votes.
For example, consider the following friendship network that the researchers studied:
In this network, five nodes hold a majority opinion (represented by the orange nodes) while four nodes hold a minority opinion (represented by the purple nodes). In figure (a), the top orange node decides to cast a vote but sees that its surrounding nodes hold the opposite opinion. Since the purple nodes outnumber the top orange node, the orange node concludes that its vote will be worthless causing dejectedness. While in figure (b), the bottom orange nodes are adjacent to orange nodes with the same opinion so they conclude that oranges have a local majority and can win without their votes resulting in complacency. Then in figure (c), it combines both figures (a) and (b) with x representing nodes that will abstain from voting resulting in a purple majority of 4-2 even though there was more support for orange resulting in a lopsided election. This simple example illustrates that election outcomes can change due to three factors: network structures, proportions of nodes that hold each of the two opinions and the arrangement of nodes.
Overall, if within a network there is consensus that one candidate is guaranteed to win or lose then voter turnout takes a hit. The reason is people find themselves thinking there is no merit in going to the polls and casting their ballot resulting in elections that may not accurately reflect the opinions of the voting population. With this study, there is a motivation to identify how might election campaigns use this information network knowledge to maximize the number of voters that heads to the polls.
Conclusion
In conclusion, information networks can be used to model, explain and predict the voting behaviour of the general population similar to the many examples from lectures that show how groups of people interact and the networks as a result. Regardless of this article, I encourage everyone eligible to exercise their democratic right to vote and cast their ballots in the municipal election!
Sources
One reply on “Could the Culprit for Low Voter Turnout be Friends?”
Completely agree with the views in this. Personally with my friends for this voting period, we didn’t even know who the candidates were, mainly just the ones that are currently in the position so it makes it easy to think that they would just win again and there would be no point in voting.
I still did my part and voted though!